


sugar, oh honey, honey

by jemmasimmmons



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, bobbi appears in a phone call, jemma x baking is a favourite always, next door neighbours au, so there's brief bobbifitz too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-05 13:18:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5376659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There were only so many times you could ask the boy next door to loan you a cup of flour and four times in two weeks was definitely approaching the limit."</p>
<p>In which Jemma Simmons tests out the limits and Leopold Fitz memorises her footfalls. A next-door neighbours AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sugar, oh honey, honey

**Author's Note:**

> Well, when my brain told me it wanted to write something sweet, I don’t think it was expecting me to take that advice quite so literally.
> 
> This is based on the prompt: ‘you’re my really hot neighbour but I have no idea how to ask someone out so I’ll just keep borrowing sugar and flour from you until you get the hint and ask me out’, and it was meant to be short but kind of ran away with me.
> 
> I really don’t think I need to mention where I got the title from, you all know the song. Hope you enjoy this! You can find me on tumblr @jeemmasimmons if you want to chat.

 

There was a boy living in the flat one door down from her.

Jemma knew that this shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did. Before she had moved into her new flat three days ago she had fully taken for granted the fact that she would most likely have both male and female neighbours. That was usually what happened when one lived somewhere; one had neighbours.

As she had shuffled around her new flat, pushing boxes full of books, camera equipment and soft furnishings in front of her with her toes, Jemma had even idly pictured the first meetings between her and her new neighbours. She had imagined smiling faces, welcoming but noncommittal handshakes, maybe even the tentative offer of a cup of tea sometime in the future as a polite display of obligatory friendship while knowing that the offer would never be taken up. She had imagined customary pleasantries and then the grateful acceptance of limiting the relationship to smiles and nods across the hallways as you were bringing in the shopping.

She and her neighbours would be friendly, yes, but they would still keep each other at arm’s length. That was how it should be done. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite how things were turning out.

In her defence, in all her idealised imaginings of her new home and the hypothetical neighbours she would have and avoid becoming friends with, Jemma had never imagined any of them looking the way this boy did.

He was like nothing she had ever expected.

Which was the only reason why his existence was so alarming to her.

(Well. Half of the reason, anyway.)

 

 

For what might have been the fourth time in half an hour, Jemma drew her fist back from the door knocker with a sigh.

Rocking on her heels, she crossed her arms over her chest and stared the door down, as if boring her eyes into it would be enough to make it quiver before her and become a little less intimidating, thus giving her the extra pinch of courage she needed to bring her hand up to it and knock.

Unfortunately, she had no such luck. For some reason, the door was not afraid of her.

_There is nothing to be nervous about_ , Jemma told herself sternly. _This is a perfectly normal thing to do._ _I live here. He lives here too. We are neighbours. I am just being neighbourly and introducing myself. It’s what any good neighbour would do._

She quickly squashed the small voice at the back of her mind whispering that she hadn’t tried to be neighbourly to anyone _else_ on their floor, and lifted her hand to knock again.

_This is a perfectly normal thing to do_.

The sound of the brass knocker tapping against the door was so crisp and loud in her ears that Jemma’s hand jumped back as if it had stung her.

_Shit_.

Almost instantly, she felt the hot coils of panic loop around her insides and the palms of her hands begin to sweat.

Oh god, what had she done? And, more importantly, what could she do _now_?

She could run. That was the most obvious solution. Her own door was just across the hall; she could easily dive back down and through it and into the safety of her flat, still with its myriad of unpacked boxes and Waitrose ready-meals in the freezer (disgusting things). No one had seen her out here. No one would ever have to know.

_But then_ …

What if there was CCTV in the hallway? Did the block have a policy on residents who played knock-knock-ginger just days after moving in? Would she be asked to _leave_? Jemma imagined the horror on her mother’s face when she had to tell her that she had been kicked out of her first independently owned home for playing a child’s game, and one that was technically illegal at that, especially under the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847 which stated—

The door in front of her swung open and suddenly the boy was standing right in front of her and Jemma forgot everything she knew about any parliamentary act passed by the Victorians.

(Which, it should be noted, was actually rather a lot.)

The boy looked almost as alarmed to find her standing on his doorstep as Jemma must have looked at being there. He was wearing plaid pyjama bottoms and a slight bleariness to his blue eyes that tugged at Jemma’s chest and it took her another few seconds before she managed to loosen her tongue enough to offer him a hopeful smile.

‘Hello.’

The boy’s mouth had been hanging half open ever since he’d opened the door; at the sound of her voice breaching this first, tentative word, it snapped shut.

‘Hi.’

His voice was courser than Jemma had expected it to be, with a slight croak to it that, along with the pyjamas and tousled hair he is sporting, led her to make the worrying conclusion that he had been fast asleep before his doorbell had rung. Before she had woken him up.

_Wonderful_.

She probably couldn’t have made a worse first impression if she’d tried to.

(Not that Jemma was in any way eager to test that theory.)

In spite of the pounding in her head telling her that this had been a bad idea, a very bad idea, a _disastrous_ idea, she tried to smile again and stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Jemma. Jemma Simmons. I just moved in next door?’

She had hoped that her words might jog something in his gaze and clear the fog there, but instead it just seemed to deepen.

‘Oh?’

When the boy didn’t take her hand to shake it, Jemma slowly retracted her arm to let it hang back by her side. _Alright then. Hand shaking was out, it appeared_.

He seemed to be waiting, she realised with a jolt, as if he was expecting her to say something else. Apparently the concept of being neighbourly was less normal than she had thought.

‘Yes!’ For the third time, Jemma titled her chin up and forced herself to give another smile, this one slightly more panicked than the other two had been. ‘I moved in this week, and I was just in the hallway and I thought that maybe I’d knock on your door and…’

She felt her words tail off as the boy frowned at her, his eyebrows creasing forwards as he tried to make sense of what she was saying. Somehow, it made the blues of his eyes become darker, deeper even. They were the kind of eyes that gave Jemma the distinct impression that if she looked into them for long enough, she would end up falling in.

‘…maybe ask…’

_Goodness, his eyes are blue_.

‘…if I could possibly…’

Jemma licked her lips as she scrambled madly to find an acceptable excuse for why she had knocked on this stranger’s door, and then spent longer than what would be deemed socially acceptable staring into his eyes, eyes that were so blue they were practically lethal.

_Oh, god_.

‘…borrow some flour?’

The lameness of the excuse sounded pathetic, even to Jemma’s ears. Why the _hell_ would she need to borrow some flour when there was a perfectly good corner shop half a mile away? The blank look on the boy’s face was completely unreadable and Jemma couldn’t quite tell whether he didn’t believe her or whether he was still half asleep.

Either way, this was now quite possibly the most embarrassing thing she had ever done.

With her heart pounding against her chest, Jemma began to offer a rapid explanation, tripping over her words in her eagerness to quell the awkwardness in the air.

‘I just need a cups-full really, it’s just that I haven’t had the opportunity to pop to the shops yet and it’s most definitely on my to-do list for this week, but work has just been keeping me so busy. And when I went to unpack my cupboards this evening, I found weevils all inside the bag I had already which was really not a promising start to my cheese sauce but-‘

The door shut abruptly, almost slamming into Jemma’s nose she had been standing so close to it, and once again she jumped back, startled.

A wave of disappointment hit her right in the chest, followed almost instantly by indignance just as strong. Jemma found she could only stare at the door in mild irritation with her mouth parted open, still half-way through forming her next word.

Maybe the concept of being neighbourly was even considered _abnormal_ around here.

She was still hovering on the doorstep, experimentally shifting her weight from one foot to the other and wondering whether it was at all possible to go about living in this building without having to interact with _anyone_ who lived here ever again, when the door in front of her opened for the second time.

She started backwards as the boy appeared, holding out a china tea cup to her filled to the brim with flour.

‘Here.’

His voice was just as gruff as it had been minutes before as he pushed the cup in her direction.

Jemma took it, winding her fingers through the delicate handle where the china was still warm where his skin had been.

She opened her mouth, ready to thank him, ready to apologise for the inconvenience, ready to take a second chance at getting this right. But before she could, the door was closing and she found herself staring at the woodwork once more.

 

 

The tea-cup of flour was laughing at her.

That was the only explanation that Jemma Simmons, for all the books she had read which were still clustered around her new flat in their neatly packed and carefully labelled cardboard boxes, could think of for why she was still staring at it, a whole hour after she had brought it home.

The simple fact of the matter was, it was taunting her.

_Bloody bugger_.

Jemma sat at her kitchen counter, her chin resting on her forearms as she watched the cup. It was a reasonably pretty, delicate little thing, with a curving handle and yellow and gold flowers painted up the sides. It looked like the kind of tea-cup used for tea parties at stately homes, not the kind of cup you would expect the boy next door to own.

(Not that Jemma had expected _anything_ from the boy next door.)

She wasn’t even sure why it was bothering her so badly, the brusque way that he had reacted to finding her on his doorstep and the way he had apparently been baffled at why she would just want to introduce herself to him without wanting anything in return.

But then again, if she was completely honest with herself, _Jemma_ wasn’t entirely sure why she had wanted to do that either, so she couldn’t really blame him for that part.

Most of all, she didn’t know why she had been so desperate to take that second chance, and why she had been so disappointed when it had been taken away from her.

With a sigh, Jemma reached out to turn the cup on the counter in front of her slightly to the left. There was a small chip, she noticed, on the lip that looked like it had been there for quite a long time. Years even. Absently, she wondered whether it had belonged to the boy’s mother, or maybe even his grandmother. She felt a slight smile tug at the corners of her mouth as she thought of that, that even this grumpy boy didn’t have the heart to throw out something that reminded him of his family.

It was sweet, really. Showed that there was something else there, behind the gruff manner and plaid pyjama bottoms. Something that might even explain why she wanted a second chance.

Another hour went by before she realised that for all her stammering and the vast expanse of awkwardness between them, she hadn’t even found out the boy’s name.

Jemma groaned, and let her head slump forward to rest in defeat on top of her arms.

As she did so, a small cloud of flour puffed up from the tea cup only to settle back down on the kitchen surface and Jemma’s hair, like the first frost of a winter’s morning.

 

 

The second time she knocked on the boy’s door, it only took her two tries to bring her fist up to make contact with the knocker.

(Hey, even a little progress was progress.)

The door opened a little quicker this time and when the boy pulled it further open so he could see her, Jemma noticed that he was dressed slightly more appropriately than he had been the day before. The pyjamas were gone, replaced by jeans and a grey t-shirt, and his eyes seemed a little more awake than they had been.

But still blue. Wonderfully blue.

‘Hello again.’ Jemma smiled apologetically. ‘I believe I knocked here yesterday. I just moved in next door, I’m Je-‘

‘Jemma, yeah,’ the boy finished her name before she could. ‘Yeah, I remember you.’

It was the first time she had heard him speak more than one word at a time, and for some reason it completely floored her.

‘Ah.’ Jemma swallowed and nodded. ‘Wonderful.’

The boy nodded back at her, with something that might have looked like bemusement in another light flickering behind his eyes. ‘Was there, uh, something…something else you needed?’

He was attractive. There was no point in trying to deny it any longer, Jemma thought reluctantly.

In her job, she had seen plenty of attractive people over the years and she liked to consider herself somewhat of an expert when it came to being able to identify them. Years of examining physiques down a camera lens and making them move in front of her like puppets pulled by strings wrapped around her fingers had given Jemma a fairly solid idea of what made a human being conventionally attractive.

This boy didn’t look like many of the models she worked with on a regular basis; that was true. He was shorter, for one thing, and lighter somehow too. But it wasn’t only his slighter build that made him seem that way; it was in the way his hair, which was a dusty sand colour, fell and how the light reflected off his skin.

And, now that the grouchy look had gone, the lightness was in his face too and made his features looked softer. Kinder. It reminded Jemma why she had wanted this second chance.

 ‘I…’

(It also reminded her what the other half of the reason she had been so alarmed to find him as her neighbour had been.)

‘I need another cup of flour.’

_Oh, bloody hell_.

Whilst she might have been a self-proclaimed expert in human attractiveness and knew more than the average person did about most things, one thing Jemma Simmons was unfortunately not very gifted at was the art of improvisation.

The boy raised a single eyebrow. ‘Just another cup?’

Jemma nodded, and waited for the door to slam in her face again. When it didn’t, she decided another explanation was necessary.

‘I’m so sorry to have to bother you again, but I’ve still not been able to get to the shops yet and it appears that most of my recipes demand a certain amount of flour and I promise this will be the last time-‘

‘It’s alright,’ the boy interrupted, the amusement in his eyes twitching the corners of his mouth in what might have been a smile. ‘Just…wait here, yeah?’

He waited until she had nodded again and then disappeared back into his flat, closing the door behind him, but softer this time so that the noise didn’t rattled all the way through Jemma’s bones.

She hung back, rubbing her thumb absently into the crook of her elbow as she waited.

The boy wasn’t like anyone Jemma had ever dated before; if anything, he was the complete antithesis. If all of Jemma’s exes had been orange, he was purple. If they had been barista-style coffee on a bustling spring morning, he was the mug of tea cupped in your hands on the crispest of autumn afternoons. If they had been open books, he was locked, with a padlock pulled over his heart.

More than anything else, Jemma found herself wishing she could find the key.

When the boy opened the door again, he was holding another tea-cup of flour, in exactly the same pattern as the last one had been. Jemma took it, cradling it in her hands.

‘Thank you…um….?’ She trailed off, remembering again that she didn’t know his name.

‘Uh, Fitz.’ The boy gestured to himself. ‘Leo Fitz, actually, but I prefer just Fitz.’

‘Fitz.’ Jemma repeated it, nodding slightly as if it had answered a question she hadn’t asked. ‘Thank you. Again.’

‘S’not a problem. Really.’

She smiled again, this time directing it more to his feet than his face as she felt a warmth wash over her face and through her skin to her bones.

When she looked up, she saw that for the first time Fitz was smiling too.

‘I’ll…see you, then.’

Jemma had only taken three steps down the hallway before he called her back, and the sound of her name on his lips made her heart skip a beat.

‘Jemma!’ She turned back in surprise as Fitz stepped out of his door, one hand still holding it open. ‘I, uh, I meant that. If you do ever need anything again…this doesn’t have to be the last time. If that makes sense.’

The warmth that Jemma had felt in her bones was slowly working its way up to her heart.

‘Yes,’ she said, and found much to her alarm that the grin she was giving him was what would most definitely be classed as shy. ‘That makes perfect sense.’

 

 

Jemma managed to make it through a full week before she found herself outside Fitz’s door again.

She had seen him several times over the past seven days, never directly, but in fleeting glances as the lift doors slid shut, or across the hall as she was unlocking her door and he was slipping out of his. Once or twice, she was gazing out of the window at the night sky when she saw him dive out of the front of their building, shrugging on a jacket over his clothes. He seemed to keep to odd hours: sometimes she would see him leave just as she was going to bed, others she would hear his door unlock while she was heading out to work.

Jemma wondered what he did for a living that made him work at such random times. And then she found herself wondering whether he was even leaving for work at all. Maybe there was something else he was going to.

(Or some _one_ else.)

This time, Jemma knocked on Fitz’s door the first time she tried.

He had it pulled open almost before she’d had the time to bring her hand back to her side. If she hadn’t known any better, Jemma could have sworn she had seen his entire face light up as he did so.

‘Hi,’ Fitz said, and his voice was slightly breathless.

‘Hi.’

He was back in pyjamas again with a hoodie pulled over them, but this time the sleepiness in his face only made him look younger rather than grumpy. The sight of his sandy curls rumpled with sleep sent a not unpleasant pang of warmth through Jemma’s body as she tried to steady herself on her feet.

‘Do you, um…’ Leaning on the doorframe, Fitz was looking at her and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. ‘Need another cup of flour?’

‘Yes!’ Jemma exclaimed, her voice coming out a little bit louder than was probably necessary in her relief that she didn’t have to fumble for a new excuse. ‘Yes. Please. That would be wonderful.’

Fitz grinned at her for a moment before turning back into his flat. His hand lingered on the door, hesitant, before pulling away and leaving it open so that Jemma could see him move back through the flat.

His home was practically identical in layout to her own, only reversed. Whereas Jemma’s kitchen was on the left as you entered, Fitz’s was on the right. If she took one step over the threshold and into his flat and then another, and another, and kept going, Jemma knew that she would eventually come to a door on her left that would lead her to his bedroom.

Fitz’s living area was right in front of the door and Jemma could see his couch facing her. It was covered in pillows, and blankets that were curled in a cocoon that came spiralling to the floor, as if its occupant had tumbled out of it in a hurry.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said guiltily as Fitz padded back across the hall to her. ‘I seem to keep waking you up.’

‘What?’ He frowned, but when Jemma gestured behind him to the couch, realisation dawned on his face and a flush crept into his cheeks. ‘Oh, no! No, no, you didn’t…I wasn’t…well, actually, I _was_ sleeping, yes, but I don’t mind. Really.’

‘Oh.’

‘And actually…’ Fitz said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I’m sorry too. For, um, the first time you knocked. I wasn’t exactly welcoming…’

‘Oh, I didn’t notice,’ Jemma lied.

‘…and it wasn’t really fair to you.  I’d had a bad time at work and I was ready to take out my mood on anything that moved too close to me. Which, unfortunately, ended up being you.’

The sheepish look on his face would have been enough to melt even the hardest of hearts, and Jemma’s heart was already well on its way to being thawed. She smiled to show that she both understood and forgave, and found that at the sight of it, Fitz did the same in relief.

‘What do you work as?’

‘I’m in security,’ he explained, holding up the mug of flour to her at the same time. ‘I mean, I’m not so great at the whole patrolling, smashing-in-faces part of the job – my partner tends to handle that – but I monitor the CCTV and check the cameras. It means working late nights a lot, but I don’t mind that.’

‘You must be quite used to people interrupting your sleep then!’ Jemma half-joked, torn between still feeling guilty and being delighted to have found out so much about him in one go.

Fitz chuckled, before bringing his free hand up to rub the back of his neck. ‘Yeah, well…no, not really. Truth is, I, uh, don’t tend to get many people knocking on my door at any time of day.’ He looked up to meet her eyes and gave her the sweetest, shyest grin Jemma had ever seen. ‘There’s just…just you.’

 (If any part of her heart had still been hardened to him, Jemma thought, by now it was well and truly melted.)

She took the cup he was holding out to her; it wasn’t a tea cup this time but a proper mug. It was one of the ones you could buy from the film and television shop in town, deep red with the Hogwarts’ crest on the front and the Gryffindor one on the back.

_Of course he would be a Gryffindor_ , Jemma thought wryly, as she thought of her own Hogwarts’ mug with its matching Lion crest in her cupboard at home.

‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised again.

Fitz was still leaning on his door and his smile turned to one of fond bemusement. ‘What for, now?’

Jemma lifted the mug of flour at him, like a toast. ‘For stealing all your flour.’

Fitz laughed softly, a quiet exhalation of breath through his nose. ‘Really, don’t worry about that.’

‘You’re sure? Because I can pay it back…’

‘Jemma,’ Fitz interrupted, his smile widening as he began to pull his door shut again. ‘It’s honestly fine. Trust me, I have _plenty_ of flour.’

 

 

‘Keeping your hand pressed on the floor for balance, lift your right leg up to the ceiling and hold it…hold on, keep holding it- Hello?’

‘Bobbi! It’s me.’

‘Oh, hey, Fitz. What’s up? Wait, I’m not late, am? I thought our shift didn’t start for another hour, I’m still teaching a class…No, Mrs Danvers, do _not_ lower your leg!’

‘Oh, no, no. You’re fine. I was just, uh, wondering if you’d mind picking something up for me on your way? I’ll pay you back.’

‘Yeah, sure. What do you need?’

‘Oh, it’s not for me, not really. It’s for a girl. And, uh, I need a bag of flour.’

 ‘A bag of fl- Uh, Fitz? Are you sure you don’t mean a bouquet of _flowers_? Girls like flowers a lot, trust me.’

‘No. I mean, of course I trust you. But no, she definitely wants flour.’

(At this, Bobbi Morse, part time security guard, part time yoga teacher and full time baffled best friend, had to pull her phone away from her ear for a moment and stare at Fitz’s caller ID, wondering how in the world she had managed to end up in this situation, with a partner who gave the girls he liked bags of flour as displays of affection.

Brits worked in mysterious ways.)

‘Uh, sure. Okay. How much flour do you need?’

‘Five hundred grams ought to do it? Oh, no, wait, better make it a pound. Just to be safe.’

‘A pound of flour. For a girl. Alright. Got it.’

‘Thanks, Bobbi, you’re the best.’

‘You know it. Need anything else while I’m at it? Tub of butter, for example? A dozen eggs…?’

‘Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.’

(After Fitz had hung up, Bobbi brought her phone down from her ear and held it in the palm of her hand, seriously considering whether she should call the little guy back and demand an explanation for why she was going to have to trudge all the way to the nearest twenty four hour supermarket to pick up a bag of flour, and a full pound of it no less, before their shift started.

Then, she sighed and shook her head, before twisting to put her phone in her back pocket and turning back to her students, still frozen in their half-moon poses.

With Fitz, she had learnt long ago that sometimes the explanation only made things more confusing.)

 

 

She couldn’t ask him for flour again.

Jemma had decided this as she had been walking home from work that afternoon, her scarf pulled tight around her neck to muffle the bitter cold of the shortening September evenings. There were only so many times you could ask the boy next door to loan you a cup of flour and four times in two weeks was definitely approaching the limit.

_No_ , Jemma reminded herself as she closed her front door firmly behind her to walk across the corridor to Fitz’s flat. On her kitchen counter, his two china tea cups and the Hogwarts mug still sat, the flour inside them quivering every time she walked past too fast. _No more flour_. She would just have to come up with another excuse for why she kept turning up on his doorstep.

_Or maybe I could even tell him the truth_.

When Fitz opened his door, the bright, beaming grin on his face made Jemma’s chest feel like it was ready to burst.

‘Let me guess!’ He looked triumphant standing in front of her, his eyes shining so brightly she felt that they were almost blinding. ‘You need a cup of-‘

‘Sugar!’ Jemma blurted out and then instantly regretted the word as she watched Fitz’s entire face fall, like she’d just kicked him off the face of the earth and laughed while doing so.

‘What?’

‘I don’t need flour. Not today. I…I have enough flour. But, um, I do need sugar. A cup-full. If you can.’

Jemma stopped her incoherent babbling and looked up apprehensively.

_Please don’t let me have blown this_.

Slowly, the crestfallen look on Fitz’s face started to fade and as he looked up at her Jemma watched his mouth stretch into a delighted smile.

_He’s not just attractive on the outside_ , she realised. _It’s the inside shining through_.

(And _that_ was the other half of the reason.)

‘I have some of that.’

 

 

She didn’t even need to knock anymore.

After another week of tip-toeing towards his flat, Fitz seemed to have the fall of her footsteps committed to memory and was already pulling open his front door before Jemma had even gotten half way across the corridor.

There was something about him doing that that made Jemma’s heart leap even higher than it usually did at seeing him. The fact that he knew something about her as intimate as the patterns of her walk and was actively listening out for her feet amongst the others walking by made her pulse race and her heart skipped a beat.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘I didn’t, um…I didn’t wake you, did I?’

‘Oh, no! No, I was awake.’

Jemma glanced down and noticed that Fitz was holding the door open with his foot, both his hands busy with holding a tea cup each. In his left hand, the cup was full of sugar, in his right, flour. Fitz noticed her staring and gave a rueful grin.

‘I wasn’t sure which one you would need today so I filled one of each. Thought it might be easier.’

At the back of her throat, Jemma felt a lump begin to form.

‘So…’ Fitz looked up from his cups and grinned at her. ‘What do you want?’

( _You. I want you_.)

When she didn’t reply, Fitz’s smile faltered and he edged a little closer out of the door towards her. ‘Or you could have both. If you’d… if you’d like.’

Jemma took the two cups from his hands and murmured a hurried ‘thank you’ in his direction, before turning brusquely on her heels and scurrying back down the corridor to her flat, already feeling her eyes start to prick and her chin start to quiver.

Fitz didn’t shut his door as she walked away. In fact, it was only after Jemma had slammed her own door shut and sunk back against it, letting her body droop to the floor, that she heard his door softly close.

Jemma let her head loll backwards and closed her eyes as the tears started to fall.

It would have hurt a lot less if she hadn’t known exactly why she was crying.

 

 

Jemma stood in the middle of her kitchen, with her hands on her hips and her feet planted firmly on the floor, and sighed deeply.

The digital clock on the cooker read 21:47 and she had originally been planning on making herself something for a late dinner. Something like lasagne, warming, filling and effortlessly comforting. Unfortunately, her plans had been cut abruptly short once she had padded into the kitchen and found that her surfaces were no longer anywhere to be seen, buried under several dozen cups filled to the brim with flour and sugar.

_Ah_.

It had been almost three months since Jemma had moved in next door to Fitz and three months since she had started pottering over to knock on his door every time she felt her heart ache loud enough for her to pay attention to it. And it had become particularly loud over the past few weeks.

But, Jemma decided, enough was enough. She couldn’t even find her toaster for all the cups crowding her kitchen and besides, she had so many of Fitz’s drinking implements (he had long stopped giving her tea-cups; they had since progressed past mugs and wine glasses onto hot flasks for crying out loud) that the poor boy was probably drinking his tea out of milk caps.

Sooner or later, he was going to ask for them back. Which meant that _she_ was going to need to empty them of the flour and sugar.

With another sigh, Jemma rolled up her sleeves and moved to the bookcase to slide out her recipe book from the shelf, before flicking to the most dog-eared, batter stained page. Then she pulled open the fridge and peered inside: she had eggs, plenty of them, and butter too.

_Excellent. Fairy cakes it is, then_.

It wasn’t quite a lasagne, but it was a start.

Jemma had always enjoyed baking, and the rhythmic routine it required. A recipe, if followed correctly, should always yield the same results. It was a repetitive task, yes, but it was predictable and Jemma liked that.

When there was so much uncertainty in life, it was quite nice to know that throwing certain things in a bowl and sticking them in the oven would always give her the same thing in the end.

She hadn’t baked since moving into her flat but it didn’t take long for Jemma to fall back into the motions: creaming the butter and sugar, whisking the eggs, weighing the flour and then washing up and drying Fitz’s cups as she went. She noticed that several of the mugs still had price stickers on the bottom; they were new and completely unused. Jemma wasn’t sure if knowing this made her want to laugh or cry.

By the time she was pulling her third batch of cakes out of the oven, the clock read 00:03.

As she baked, Jemma allowed her mind to wander aimlessly. In a pattern that had become as predictable as the movements of her arms as she folded the flour into the eggs, her thoughts turned to Fitz.

She hadn’t expected any of this when she had moved in next door. She hadn’t expected _him_ , and she certainly hadn’t expected to be so attracted to him. It was almost as if their sides had been magnetised in another life and she was being pulled by an uncontrollable force back to his side and it was inescapable, even if she wanted to escape it.

It wasn’t even that he was attractive to her physically – although he was, incredibly so, in a way that made Jemma want to look at him forever while at the same time knowing that looking for too long might blind her. He had a heart larger than anyone she had ever met before, even if it was buried under layers of shyness and occasional grumpiness. He was sweet, and thoughtful, and when they were talking on his doorstep Jemma wished she could grow roots just to be able to stay there forever.

She hadn’t expected to fall for him.

But then when did anyone ever _expect_ to fall? Surely, the entire point of falling was that it happened without you noticing, without warning.

And, Jemma mused glumly as she sieved yet another four ounces of flour into her mixing bowl, she hadn’t been the only one not to notice her fall.

She had thought that he might have done by now. After three months of knocking on his door once, often twice, a week, asking for a cup’s worth of his attention, she had thought Fitz might have noticed her.

Sometimes, when she watched his eyes light up when he pulled open the door for her or his fingers lingered for a fraction of a second too long on her own as he put the cup of sugar in her hands, Jemma would feel her heart jump traitorously with hope, thinking that he had finally caught up and followed her in falling.

But then he kept letting her walk away.

_So I keep on borrowing his bloody sugar_.

The sound of the knock on her door startled Jemma so much that she nearly dropped the tray of cakes as she pulled them out of the oven. Even though she had lived in the flat for almost a month now she hadn’t had any visitors yet, let alone any who had needed to knock. Cutting through the deep quiet of her introspective thoughts, the sound was remarkably jarring.

Quickly sliding the cakes onto the sideboard, Jemma glanced at the clock above the oven door and noted with a jolt of horror that it was nearing three o’clock in the morning.

_Oh, bugger_.

Baking wasn’t exactly a silent activity, particularly when coupled with her electric mixer and the vigorous clatter of her tin trays, and as Jemma hurried out of the kitchen to her front door her mind began to frantically search for an acceptable apology for the angry neighbour whose sleep her nocturnal activity had interrupted.

The words were poised on the tip of her tongue as she pulled the door open, only to die away as soon as she saw who was waiting on her doorstep.

Fitz stood, hands wringing anxiously in front of him, just behind her door with his gaze directed to the ground. He looked up as Jemma opened the door and his eyes widened.

‘Um, hi.’

Jemma’s mouth hovered open and though she knew it would probably be in her best interest to pull it shut, somehow she didn’t seem able to.

Fitz was dressed in what she assumed must be his work gear. A simple black shirt, with a faint checked pattern and pressed black trousers, with a smart leather jacket pulled over the top. His collar was turned up, as a meagre defence against the cold of the early December night and the slight precipitation on the top of his curls made his hair look darker, sleeker.

It was probably the most put together she had ever seen him.

In stark contrast, she realised that how she looked right now probably the most dishevelled _Fitz_ had ever seen _her_.

Jemma swallowed, finally managing to let her mouth drift shut. With the weight of this realisation, she found herself acutely aware that she was in her pyjamas, covered from head to toe in flour and cake mixture, barefooted and with her hair unbrushed.

Self-consciously, she brought up a hand to tuck her hair back behind her ears and brush her cheeks to dust off any undesirable specs of flour.

‘Hi.’

Fitz was staring at her, his eyes still wide and his hands frozen in front of him. Usually, Jemma would find people staring at her uncomfortable, but the way Fitz was watching her wasn’t an unnerving sort of stare at all. If anything it reminded Jemma of the way people watched the night sky: in wonder, but carefully, as if in fear that the night would pass into sunlight before they had the chance to drink in all they wanted to and they would have to wait another day to see the stars.

‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted out suddenly. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you-‘

‘Oh, you didn’t-‘

‘I was just coming back in from my shift and I was on my way home when I turned into the corridor but your door is nearer to the lift and as I was going by…I could just…smell…’

He trailed off, but even as he said it Jemma took a breath in and instantly knew what he had meant.

Bridged in the doorway between her flat and the corridor outside, the scent of sugar and vanilla coming from her cooking was intoxicating in a way it hadn’t been in the kitchen. It was almost dizzying now she was aware of it, the pull of the warm smell filling her nose and making her itch to return to her baking to wrap herself up in it.

But, somehow, with one hand on the doorframe and barely three steps away from Fitz, she couldn’t move.

Fitz inhaled deeply, his eyes briefly flickering shut. While they were closed, Jemma took the opportunity to watch his face change as he breathed in and see the tension behind his jaw release and the corners of his mouth lift ever so slightly. When his eyes opened again and brightened a little when they found her own gaze resting on him, Jemma’s cheeks didn’t flush and she didn’t feel the need to immediately look away.

In that small corridor between their two flats at 3am, a new kind of balance seemed to have settled.

Fitz licked his bottom lip nervously.

‘Are you, um…are you baking?’

Jemma let out a breath she hadn’t know she had been holding and found her face easing into a smile. Almost as if he had been waiting for her approval, Fitz instantly smiled back.

Inside, Jemma felt the knots in her stomach loosen as she held her front door open a little wider.

‘Would you like to come in?’

 

 

Fitz, as it turned out, was a hideous baker.

The first batch of fairy cakes they made together could at best have been described as an unfortunate culinary experimentation, never to be spoken of again and never repeated. At worst, the description would have been made up of the sort of language that would have had Jemma’s mother reaching for her carbolic soap to scrub their mouths out vigorously.

It had been within minutes of starting to bake together that Jemma had discovered Fitz’s talents lay somewhere very far away from wooden spoons and weighing scales. He was incapable of cracking an egg without getting pieces of shell dropped in the mixture and when she had handed him the whisk to fold the flour into the batter, most of it had ended up slopped onto the floor. His weighing skills were also disastrous, especially seeing as it was only once all the ingredients had been mixed together, and the tray slid into the oven, that they realised he had added fourteen ounces of flour to the mixture instead of four.

Needless to say, the tray of cakes went straight from the oven to the bin.

After that Jemma wordlessly took over the baking, the mixing bowl passing from Fitz’s hands to hers without complaint. Much to her relief, Fitz didn’t leave; instead, he ran a sink full of hot soapy water and began to wash up the remainder of his cups that they had emptied, along with the rest of the cooking utensils. Once he had done that, he opened a drawer and pulled out a tea towel and began to dry up.

He was watching her as her hands flew over her ingredients, his eyes carefully taking in the way she could crack an egg one handed on the edge of her porcelain bowl, the way she tapped the sieve lightly against the palm of her hand to shake the flour through evenly. Jemma knew he was watching, the weight of his gaze feeling like the warmth of sunlight on the small of her back, but it still didn’t bother her.

If fact, it felt rather nice.

At some point, Fitz began to load up his arms with cups and head out of the hallway towards his own flat. He never said anything about it as he was doing it, and because of this Jemma found that any embarrassment she was afraid she might feel if he knew she had never used any of the flour and sugar she had borrowed from him simply did not exist.

They had fallen into a routine so quiet and comfortingly familiar that there was no space for those kind of anxieties. Any space that there might have been was completely filled with companionship.

Soon, the last teacup of sugar had been used up.

When Fitz walked out of her flat cradling the last of his mugs in his arms, Jemma pulled another bowl out from her cupboard and measured out just an ounce of icing sugar into it. There was no question in her mind of him not coming back now he had retrieved all his mugs. Of course he’s coming back.

By the time Fitz appeared in the doorway of the kitchen again, arms empty and his hands in his pockets, Jemma had spread a thin layer of glace icing across two of the cakes and topped them each with a pinch of hundreds and thousands.

She glanced up just as Fitz’s eyes fell upon the fairy cakes and couldn’t help grinning as his face, etched with faint lines of tiredness, lit up.

‘A reward.’ Jemma’s voice was hoarse after their silence as she held the cakes out on her open palm with a raised eyebrow. ‘For all your hard work?’

Fitz stood to the side and held out his arm in an invitation; once Jemma had walked past him into the hall, he turned to follow her into the living room.

‘I don’t know about that,’ he said sheepishly as Jemma led him to her couch. ‘I think it was you who did most of the work. I just washed the dishes.’

‘Which is something I wouldn’t have gotten finished for _at least_ another hour if I had been on my own,’ Jemma pointed out, before remembering that for the most part the washing up had consisted of Fitz’s teacups. ‘So…thank you. For doing that.’

Fitz shrugged his shoulders modestly, and grinned. ‘Not a problem.’

For a moment, Jemma could only smile back, the almost overwhelming weariness behind her eyes making the light framing out behind his head appear to glow. Then, blinking hard twice, she gestured to the sofa.

They both sat, Jemma tucking her feet up underneath her and leaning up against the cushions while Fitz sat next to her, but keeping what would be deemed a suitable distance between them, a distance Jemma found herself wishing wasn’t there at all. His hands rested loosely on the tops of his knees, until she held out the cake for him.

He took it, eagerly, and began to peel back the paper casing. Jemma did the same, but slower, so that she was just lifting her own cake to her lips as Fitz bit into his.

‘Oh.’ He closed his eyes as he took the bite and Jemma couldn’t help peering over the top of her cake to watch as his face melted into an expression of pure satisfaction. ‘Oh God. Oh God, that’s…’

In spite of herself, Jemma could not help a smug glimmer of pride at hearing his various noises of appreciation.

‘Good then?’ she asked, concealing her smile behind her cake.

Fitz shook his head as he swallowed the rest of his cake in two large bites. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was delicious. Best cake I’ve ever had.’

Jemma scoffed, and rolled her eyes at him as she popped her own cake firmly into her mouth. The sponge was good, light and moist without being too dense, but in her personal opinion was lacking in vanilla. She made a mental note to crush an extra vanilla pod next time she baked.

‘I think that’s a slight exaggeration. It’s just butter, eggs, flour and sugar. There’s nothing special in here.’

Fitz shook his head again, but slower this time. ‘Nah. There’s something else there, something more.’

‘Oh, really?’ Jemma cocked her head and grinned, pushing herself forward so she was sitting back on her heels on the sofa cushions facing him. ‘And what’s that then?’

Fitz gave a nervous chuckle as she moved herself, and Jemma noticed that he had moved too: now his knees were turned towards her instead of facing the room and one of his arms had come up to rest on the back of the sofa. If she had leant her body slightly sideways, her forearm would have brushed gently against his fingers.

‘I don’t know.’ His words were soft, murmured into the space between them with a magnetism that made Jemma look up towards him. ‘There’s just…more.’

He looked up to meet her gaze and Jemma felt a sudden warmth flood through her bones at the surprising affection in his eyes, followed by a not unpleasant tingling running down her spine. Sitting solidly in her chest, her heart began to quicken.

It felt like a long time before Fitz broke away from her, clearing his throat and gazing around her living room. As he did so, Jemma couldn’t help but feel a slight twinge of disappointment.

‘You have a lot of books,’ he remarked, in a tone caught part way between conversational and awed.

Jemma followed his eyes to her floor to ceiling bookcase, packed so tightly with books that it had started overflowing to unstable stacks on the rug underneath it.

‘Yeah, I guess I do.’

She tried not to sound as guilty about it as she had often felt when discussing her reading, as if her thirst for knowledge was something to be ashamed about instead of proud. But one tentative look at Fitz’s face, and the quiet admiration there, let Jemma’s shoulders relax and a note of confidence returned to her voice.

‘I like to read. Fiction too, but I prefer non-fiction really. History in particular; most of those books are history books.’

‘Ah.’ Fitz nodded, but the gesture left an invitation, a space for her to keep filling with her words. Jemma felt her heart skip a beat as she realised he was genuinely interesting in listening to her.

‘It’s like a domino effect,’ she continued, feeling her voice start to shake unnecessarily in her excitement. ‘You read one book, and you learn so many new things about a part of time in one part of the world, things that you never knew before and it’s all so new and wonderful. But then you read one line, or something else stands out while you’re reading and you want to know more about that too. So you have to go find another book to find out about that. And then it happens again, so you have to find another book, and another, and another. And it never stops.’

Jemma stopped abruptly, her breath catching a little in her throat. Fitz was still looking at her books but, somehow, she knew he was still listening to her.

‘There’s an eternity of history out there,’ she said, quietly. ‘And we add to it every day. It would be impossible for one person to know it all.’

‘Well, if anyone ever could…’ Fitz glanced across at her and gave a slow smile. ‘I’m willing to bet it would be you.’

Jemma returned the smile and Fitz’s eyes shifted from her face back to the room. She watched as they lit up when they fell upon a carefully packed box in the corner, with a tripod poking out of the top and the pretty floral patterned tin she kept her lens in resting on the floor beside it.

‘Is that…camera equipment?’

‘Ah…well, yes. It is.’

‘So, you’re an amateur photographer _as well_ as a history buff?’

‘I’m a photographer, but less of the amateur, thank you very much.’ Without meaning to, Jemma felt her chest puff out a little with pride, as it always did when she talked about her work. ‘That’s my work equipment.’

If she had thought it were possible, she could have sworn the admiration in Fitz’s face increased by threefold. ‘You’re a photographer, then? A professional one?’

‘I’m the director of photography at a museum, yes. I take the photos they use to catalogue the artefacts mostly, but when they stage enactment scenes for the exhibits I direct and then photograph those. Arrange the actors, position them, choose the staging and so on.’

Fitz swivelled around to her, an unreadable expression on his face. ‘Wait – at a museum? Do you mean the museum at the castle, in town?’

Jemma nodded, uncertainly. ‘Well, that’s the only museum around for miles…’

Fitz gave a short laugh of disbelief and shook his head at her. ‘Yeah, but _I_ work at the museum! That’s where I run security! I’ve been working there…what, three years? Four?’

‘You’re kidding!’ Jemma felt a bubble of laughter rise in her chest as she recognised the absurdity of the revelation. ‘I’ve been there since I left uni.’

‘Me too!’

Fitz laughed again and the sound was so infectious that Jemma couldn’t help doing the same, her head suddenly giddy with lack of sleep and delight at the unexpected discovery. Once they had managed to stop laughing, she noticed that her shoulder had slid down to lean up against the back of the sofa and Fitz’s fingers were trailing lazily against her bare shoulder, like they had been doing it for all their lives.

Without really thinking about it, Jemma found herself shifting even closer.

‘It’s mad,’ she said, the shadow of a giggle still pulling at her words and dragging them out into the air to be spoken. ‘We’ve probably been sharing lockers next to each other in the staff room for years.’

‘Yeah!’ Fitz chuckled and rubbed at the back of his neck ruefully. ‘And to think of all the times I was coming home as you were going out. We were going to and coming from the same place…and we just never knew…’

The laugh that had been in Jemma’s throat caught, and her smile faded to the mere ghost of one as she realised what his words meant.

_You noticed me too_.

‘Insane,’ Fitz said, more to himself than to her. The amazement in his eyes was shining, brighter than any of the lamps in the room. ‘We’ve lived next door to each other for three months…and I didn’t even know what you did for a living until five minutes ago.’

‘Well, in all fairness,’ Jemma remarked, ‘we’ve not exactly done something like this before, have we?’

‘No,’ Fitz admitted, his gaze sliding up to meet hers. ‘We haven’t.’

It was only at this point that Jemma realised her knees were resting against his thigh and that if she bent her head down any lower she would be resting her forehead against his.

Fitz’s hand had been resting on his leg but now it seemed to have fallen to the side, so his fingers were just brushing against her own. His hands were warm where they touched her fingertips, like there were beams of sunlight trapped inside even in the darkest time of night.

Abruptly, though, he drew his hand back across his lap.

‘Jemma, can I…can I tell you something?’

All at once, Jemma felt the mood of the moment shift from under her feet and she sat up a little straighter.

‘Yeah…I mean, yes. Of course you can.’

In his lap, Fitz’s hands were dancing anxiously back and forth as if they weren’t properly attached to his body. ‘This is, um…sorry, this is a bit embarrassing…’

His nerves were palpable, and Jemma’s mind began to tick furiously for what could be so important, and yet so difficult, for him to tell her.

_He didn’t like the cake after all. He wants me to pay him back the fifty quid’s worth of flour I borrowed and then never used. He has a girlfriend_.

_(He thinks this is all a mistake.)_

‘D’you remember,’ Fitz said abruptly, ‘that first time you knocked on my door, all those months ago?’

_Like it was yesterday_.

Jemma kept her mouth closed, and nodded quietly.

‘And I was…well, I was pretty awful to you.’

‘Oh, you weren’t that-‘

‘I was,’ Fitz interrupted, fixing her with a look that told Jemma he knew exactly how bad he had been and no amount of weak protest from her could fool him. ‘You know I was. And I knew it too, from the moment I shut the door in your face.’ He winced guiltily. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.’

For a moment, Jemma remembered the teacup of flour on her kitchen surface and the way it had sat in front of her, teasing her of the failure of her best placed intentions. She remembered the chip on the china lip of the cup, and the promise it gave her of a story behind the boy next door.

‘I remember that,’ she said softly.

Fitz nodded, biting down hard on his bottom lip. Jemma folded her hands together in her lap and waited for him to resume talking again. Just like he had listened to her, now it was her turn to listen to him.

‘It was all I could think about,’ Fitz repeated. ‘For the rest of that day, and then when I got to work, and then because of that Bobbi had to send me home early because I wasn’t concentrating and accidentally set off three smoke alarms in the Anglo Saxon exhibit.’

Jemma smiled, and ducked her head in a vain attempt at hiding how much hearing this affected her. Inside her chest, she felt her heart flip over.

‘I just kept wishing I could go back and do it all again. Have you come back and I could not be a complete arse to you. You know…have a second chance to do things better.’

Fitz sighed, and looked up to meet her eyes. Jemma blinked, struck by the sincerity there, and by something else she couldn’t quite identify yet.

 ‘And then you knocked on my door again.’

He smiled nervously and rubbed his hands together, one thumb covering the other.

‘Thank you,’ Fitz said, quietly. ‘Thank you for giving me that second chance.’

Jemma shrugged, suddenly speechless in the wake of this confession. She had been right before, about the mood of the moment changing, because it had. What she had been wrong about, however, was thinking that the change would be for the worse.

If anything, the moment now just felt deeper, more concrete. It felt like they were laying foundations.

‘Well,’ she said softly, ‘I like to believe that everyone deserves a second chance.’

Fitz smiled, and it felt like the entire room could have been powered by his smile alone. ‘Thank you.’

‘Fitz…you’re more than welcome.’

They settled back into their positions on the sofa, Fitz’s more relaxed and open than it had been before and Jemma found that her knees had found their way back to being pressed against his leg. On the back of the sofa, their arms were twisting together. Impulsively, she reached out, taking his hand out of his lap and twining her own fingers through his, opening his palm up towards her as she did so. Fitz started, but then eased into the unexpected contact with a smile, his fingers closing carefully around her own as their hands fell back down between them. Softly, his thumb began to rub tiny circles into Jemma’s skin.

‘Can I…can I ask you something?’

Jemma nodded, licking her bottom lip. ‘Yeah. Anything.’

Fitz twisted his head from where it was leaning against the back of the sofa so that their foreheads were touching. His skin was warm, and Jemma could feel that warmth seeping into her bones. ‘This is going to sound like a really stupid question, I know but…do you…do you believe in fate?’

Jemma hesitated. If you’d asked her this morning, she would have thrown back her head and laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. _No_ , she’d have said, _we make our own destinies_. Fate has nothing to do with any path down which we choose to journey.

_But now_ …

She thought about her bookcase, and the dozens of history books she had read and the stories they told her. She thought about all the hundreds of seemingly impossible coincidences throughout time that had ended up changing the face of the world forever, despite all the odds stacked against them. She thought about how wonderful that was.

She thought about her decision to move here, and how she had chosen her flat so that it was the perfect distance from her job for her to cycle there everyday. She thought about the way she had felt when she had first seen Fitz across the hallway of the block, and how startling that feeling had been to her. She thought about the fact that they had been working in the same building for the past three years without noticing each other and now had ended up sitting on her sofa, eating fairy cakes with sugared icing, and their limbs so intertwined that in the half-darkness she couldn’t tell whose was whose anymore.

She thought about the cups of flour and sugar, stacking themselves up on her kitchen surfaces.

‘No,’ Jemma murmured. ‘No, I don’t believe in fate.’

Fitz’s face creased slightly and his mouth parted part way, as if he were about to say something, but then stopped. Jemma found her eyes pulled down to his lips, watching them as they seemed to tremble as he noticed where her gaze was directed. His chest was rising and falling, and Jemma wondered if that meant his heart was racing as hard as hers.

‘But for this, I think I may have to make an exception.’

Their faces were already so close together that it took remarkably little effort for Jemma to dip her head and let her lips find his.

The kiss was initially no more than that, their lips pressed together with the lightest of pressures, held in the chastest of kisses. Jemma felt her eyes fall shut and she breathed out against his lips.

Then, Fitz’s hand that had been resting on the back of the sofa came up to cup her face, bringing it even closer than it had been, and his lips opened up towards hers and, as he did so, Jemma felt something stir in her gut unlike anything she had ever felt there before.

The kiss deepened, but somehow managed to maintain the impossible gentleness it had begun with, as Fitz’s hand untangled from Jemma’s and came up to her waist, guiding her carefully across the sofa until she was sitting across his lap and her arms were clasped around his neck.

Jemma felt an excited shudder run down her spine at the movement and took the opportunity to kiss him again, feeling the weight of his lips, the press of his nose to hers and the thrum of his heartbeat against her chest. In between the breathless motions of their lips and the way the heat in her cheeks seemed to be rising with each passing second, Jemma couldn’t help but marvel at the way their heartbeats had managed to sync with the other, beating together in perfect harmony.

Fitz’s lips were careful as they caressed her own, his hands even more so as they brushed under the cotton of her t-shirt. Their kisses tasted like sugar, like the sweetness of icing and the drops of vanilla. But there was something else there too, something behind the sweetness that Jemma only managed to latch onto as she titled her body forward and let her hands move up to brush through his hair.

_(There’s something else there. There’s just…more.)_

 ‘Fitz,’ she gasped, as he drew away from her just long enough for her to breathe the word out. ‘Fitz, there’s something I need to tell you.’

‘Mmm?’ His face was dazed as he looked up at her, his chest heaving and his cheeks flushed. There was a light in his eyes though, a light that it gave Jemma an uncontainable thrill to think that she had put there. ‘What’s…what’s that?’

‘I lied. Every single time I came to your door I was lying. I never needed any flour, or sugar, not any of the times I came knocking. I was lying.’

She hadn’t even finished the last sentence before Fitz was laughing again, his shoulders shaking and his grin stretching wide as he tried to hide it. The sight of his giddiness was enough to set her off again too, and Jemma tipped her forehead forwards as she gave way to her giggles, her heart and mind feeling lighter than it had in a long time.

Fitz moved upwards to kiss her again, his smiled pressing against hers as he moved their lips together and his hands held her closer to him, suddenly filled with an unexpected gentle courage. Jemma opened herself up to his kiss, her body feeling almost weightless with the buoyancy that can only be found in perfectly equal pleasure.

Hidden between the feel of Fitz’s hands holding her waist and the softness of his kiss, Jemma found her _more_.

 

 

The sudden golden streaks of light shining through her closed eyelids made Jemma screw her eyes tightly shut, and blink a few times to dislodge the crusts of sleep, before opening them one at a time. The first thing she saw when she did so was the gentle rise and fall of Fitz’s sleeping chest.

Jemma exhaled, slowly, and let her head rest back down to the space it had found inside his shoulder with a secret smile.

She couldn’t quite remember how long they had spent kissing upright before Fitz had slid sideways so he was lying on his back on the couch, with her still straddling him and her feet tucked into his sides. She wasn’t even sure how long they had lain kissing like that either, only that it had been until her lips felt like they were burning and Fitz’s mouth looked red and raw. One thing that Jemma could remember perfectly, however, was the singular moment of exhausted bliss she had felt as she had pressed one last tender, tired kiss to Fitz’s nose before falling down to fit inside the crook of his arm and sleep at last.

Glancing upwards to the clock on her wall next to her bookcase, Jemma was startled to find that they had slept for all of the morning and it was now approaching mid-afternoon. With Fitz’s shoulder to use as a pillow and his steady breathing to lull her into sleep, she hadn’t had so good a night’s sleep in months.

Tentatively, Jemma stretched her body out experimentally, letting her legs slide through Fitz’s as she tucked herself further into his side, burrowing herself into his warmth. The movement, slight as it was, was enough to make Fitz stir and Jemma looked up just as he opened his eyes.

He smiled almost as soon as he saw her, his face crinkling up in a manner Jemma could not class as anything other than adorable, and he gave a contented little sigh as the hand cupping her shoulder squeezed her ever so gently.

Jemma raised an eyebrow at him good naturedly. ‘What?’

Fitz shook his head as he leant back against the arm of the couch and his smile widened into a broad grin.

‘It wasn’t a dream.’

His words were luminous, glowing in Jemma’s mind, in her eyes, in her heart. She bit her lip to hide her smile and dipped her head so she could press her nose into his chin.

(He’d been worried about that too.)

Stretched out along the length of her sofa with her arm draped over Fitz’s stomach and his fingers dancing the length of her arm, Jemma felt a pleasant start at how easily they had slipped into this kind of quiet intimacy. She felt calm. She felt contented. She felt like she could stay lying here for the rest of her life.

She liked Fitz. She liked him in a way she couldn’t remember ever liking _anyone_ before. He had brought an unexpected light into her world, a light Jemma now couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be without. He had brought her sweetness too, sweetness in his smiles, in his kisses and in his cups of sugar. And, really, who didn’t need an extra pinch of sweetness in their lives?

_Even if this isn’t fate, it sure as hell feels a lot like it_.

Jemma took a deep breath, and propped herself up so she was leaning above him.

‘Fitz?’

‘Hmm?’

‘I was just wondering whether you’d, um, like to go for dinner with me sometime?’

The words came out in a rush, as if she was afraid that the courage she had mustered up to speak them would desert her before she had gotten them out in the right order. Given the amount of times they had felt like they had been on the tip of her tongue over the past few months, Jemma figured it was quite likely that they might.

But today, she had managed to get them out.

A slow smile started to spread out on Fitz’s face, until he was beaming from ear to ear, and he nodded, once and then twice.

‘Yeah.’ His voice was soft and tinged with a kind of wonderment that made Jemma’s heart flip over in her chest. ‘Yeah, I’d…I’d really like to do that. With you. Sometime.’

Jemma returned his smile, the movement coming as easily to her as breathing, and let her fingers thread out through his so she could squeeze his hand. Fitz squeezed back, and Jemma settled herself back down into his side and closed her eyes again, wondering if they could fall back into sleep as easily as they had done the night before.

(She wondered if falling asleep together would become something she could do every night.)

A plaintive growl from Fitz’s stomach made them both jump and Jemma had to cover her mouth to stifle her snort of surprise.

Fitz winced before patting his middle, like he could muffle the rumblings, and shot her a sheepish look.

‘I, um, don’t suppose you’ve got any more of those cakes lying about…have you?’

 

 

(Although Jemma didn’t know it at the time, Fitz’s kisses tasted even sweeter once he had eaten three more fairy cakes and dabbed her nose with the icing and she had kissed him again as he was trying to wipe it off.

She didn’t know it then.

But she was very soon to find out.)

 


End file.
